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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
O
P
I
N I
O
Jonah
Goldberg
The Nugget
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Letters to the Editor…
The Nugget welcomes contributions from its readers, which must include the writer’s name, address and phone number. Let-
ters to the Editor is an open forum for the community and contains unsolicited opinions not necessarily shared by the Editor.
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To the Editor:
Normally I am in full agreement with your
thoughtful and well-written commentaries. But
your November 1 commentary entitled: “Meet
the new boss: Dawn of the Red Century,” was
a bridge too far. It is agreed that communism
has failed miserably in most respects, but
then you airily proceeded to malign demo-
cratic socialism and connect it to the red
menace.
You darkly warn “...that it (democratic
socialism) is vulnerable to being highjacked
by control-freak tyrants whose intentions
are far from benign.” You further state the
“Iron Law of Oligarchy” inevitably means
that oligarchies of elites eventually take con-
trol. And, the “...elite cares more for their
own power and control rather than your
well-being.”
You see democratic socialism, to a greater
or lesser degree, successfully practiced in
Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Canada, France,
Germany and other countries. Evidence their
well-developed universal healthcare and free
or low-cost college education systems and
other benefits for the people.
See LETTERS on page 22
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The GOP is running as
smoothly as a dry Slip ’N
Slide made from sandpaper.
That the party is as dysfunc-
tional as the human resources
department at the Weinstein
Company stems from a host
of ideological, political and
structural problems that are
only compounded by the fact
that the president grabs the
public’s attention like a spi-
der monkey running through
a church with a lit stick of
dynamite.
The Democratic Party,
meanwhile, has gotten
drunk on the spectacle. And
as with many a drunk, it’s
grown oblivious to its own
decrepitude.
Donna Brazile, the
longtime high-ranking
Democratic functionary,
was made interim chair of
the party shortly before the
2016 election in the wake of
revelations that the previous
chair, Debbie Wasserman
Schultz, seemed to be play-
ing favorites in the pri-
maries, tilting the scales
toward Hillary Clinton and
against Bernie Sanders. In an
excerpt from her forthcom-
ing book, “Hacks,” Brazile
reports that Wasserman
Schultz wasn’t simply partial
towards Clinton. She was in
fact Clinton’s vassal.
It’s widely known that
Barack Obama left the
Democratic Party in sham-
bles. On his watch, the party
lost more than 1,000 elective
offices at the federal, state
and local level. One under-
reported reason for this is
that Obama opted to create
a parallel institution out of
his 2012 campaign outfit,
Organizing for America.
The renamed Organizing for
Action siphoned money and
the president’s energies from
the DNC.
Brazile reports that the
party was so hollowed out
with debt that Hillary Clinton
essentially scooped it up in
a distress sale. Wasserman
Schultz cut a deal with the
Clinton campaign in which
Clinton would raise millions
ostensibly for the party, par-
ticularly at the state level.
But those funds were sluiced
back into the Clinton cam-
paign coffers in Brooklyn,
and the campaign extracted
de facto control of the party’s
messaging and hiring. Team
Clinton mocked Sanders as a
paranoid dotard for claiming
that the Democratic primary
system was rigged against
him. As it happens, his para-
noia didn’t go far enough.
It seems axiomatic that
any party weak enough to
be taken over by Hillary
Clinton is not in good health.
Today, the Democratic
Party’s sole unifying prin-
ciple is opposition to Donald
Trump. Given Trump’s
standing in the polls, that
may be good enough for the
2018 midterm elections. But
when it comes to ideas about
governing, all of the passion
is reserved for two things.
First, there is Sanders’
idea of “socialism,” which
is really an unworkable stew
of banalities and nostrums
stemming from a nostal-
gic idea of a “Scandinavian
model” that no longer exists
(if it ever did). It’s as if
Fabian socialists created
an Epcot Center exhibit of
Sweden in the 1950s, and
irascible tour guide Bernie
rides by in a trolley, shout-
ing: “This could be us!”
The second source of
passion is the angry, sancti-
mony-besotted identity poli-
tics popular on college cam-
puses and a handful of left-
wing websites. The DNC’s
data services manager
recently sent out an email
soliciting applications for
new hires in the IT depart-
ment. She cautioned that
she wasn’t looking for any
“cisgender straight white
males.”
If you want to know how
Trump was elected, ask
yourself how a laid-off, cis-
gender, straight, white, male
coal miner who went back to
community college to learn
computers might react to
that.
Again, you wouldn’t be
crazy for thinking the GOP
is like a runaway fire at a
soiled diaper reclamation
center. And I’m sure I’ll
have opportunities in the
near future to expand on
that.
But the important point is
that dysfunction isn’t zero-
sum. Right now, the best
argument Republicans have
is “we’re not Democrats,”
and the best argument
Democrats have is “we’re
not Republicans.” Like two
punch-drunk pugilists lean-
ing on each other in the 12th
round, if one falls, the other
may well fall, too.
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Opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer and
are not necessarily shared by the Editor or The Nugget Newspaper.